


Marginalia

by eirabach



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, I Was Drunk When I Wrote This, what is character without a story, what is in this gin, what is real anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-18 07:11:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15480366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eirabach/pseuds/eirabach
Summary: The notes left at the edge of a text.





	Marginalia

At first he’d thought he was dead.

That would seem the most logical conclusion after all. He’d felt the burn of the knife in his back, seen the colour drain from the mad woman’s face, the world turning grey and soft and cold around him.

And then he was here. Trapped in the lIminal space between great grey-yellow walls. Stacks of parchment towering above him into eternity, each bound to be covered with the details of his sins. An ignominious end to an ignoble life.

It was only logical.

Wasn’t it?

—-

She isn’t dead, of that alone she’s certain.

She’d been planning for Henry’s knighthood. Her head full of arrangements, her basket half full of the herbs for the banquet, when she’d blinked and found herself here, in the centre of a fog-choked parchment maze. Alone.

So she may be lost, yes, amongst the towering shelves of this grey, musty place. Terrified beyond measure, perhaps. But not dead. And her mother always assured her that while there was life there was hope.

Or perhaps it was the other way around.

She forgets.

—-

He remembers.

Funny little things, like the way his mother snorted when she laughed or the tang of the bilges after too long below deck.

He hears voices. Voices he knows and yet doesn’t all at once. They swirl around him in the fog, taunting and teasing him like the spirits he supposes them to be, whispering to him of things he can’t remember, won’t forget.

He remembers her.

—-

She forgets herself.

Kicks at the stacks, shouts into the void, bitter invectives on her tongue that would send her mother’s hair as white as her namesake.

Her mother doesn’t come. No servants, no knights, ride to her rescue. No Henry. No Papa.

She hears their voice sometimes. They’re brought to her on the unnatural wind and honestly, they’re not quite right. The tone, the accents, the words are all wrong. Odd.

She calls out in reply, or tries to, but her own voice is swallowed by the darkness and spat back at her in ways she can’t understand.

_There are no fairy godmothers in this world._

No one comes. She sits alone until she forgets there was ever anyone to come. Until her world is nothing but the swirling fog, and him.

—-

He knows she can’t be truly trapped here as he is. His sins are endless, his value pitiful, and even their brief acquaintance had shown him that she deserved far more than this bleak place.

Than him.

So he’s quite certain he’s gone mad. He doesn’t recall all of the many, many dire warnings from the priests of his childhood, but no doubt somewhere along the line he’s allowed his immortal soul to slip into insanity.

He suspects it might have been the first moment he laid eyes on her.

_Until I met you._

It would make sense. So little else seems to.

She flits at the edge of his vision like a spirit moving in and out of the grey fog at the edges of this purgatory. He sees her white cloak slipping around the corner of the maze ahead of him. Hears the echo of her voice when he calls.

Listens, but the reply never comes.

—-

_Emma?_

It used to mean something, she thinks. That word.

That man. He’s her only company, a shape just at the edge of her vision who blurs in and out of focus with the movement of the fog. He watches her like he knows her which is ridiculous because well -

_My boyfriend? Hook?_

But she hears that word, that word in his voice - because it is his, she knows that even though she knows nothing else. Knows it in her bones.

She hears that, and it means something.

She thinks he might have meant something too. Dark and pretty and dangerous, she thinks. She thinks she might have liked that. She thinks it might have mattered.

_Come back to me._

She doesn’t know.

—-

He doesn’t know how to reach her, or even if he can. He sees her evermore fleetingly, pale and frightened against the sallow walls, reaches for her hand and catches air.

_One-handed pirate with a drinking problem._

She looks at him, and -

_I sense we were close?_

_Very._

He tries to speak again but his words are mere ash against a dead tongue, and the fog grows ever thicker, darker. It swirls between them in great waves, crashing over the stacks and falling back to settle in his lungs, in his eyelashes. In his heart.

He opens his mouth and chokes on it. It settles into his skin. Onto his hook.

_How did you get the hook?_

He doesn’t know.

—-

The voices get louder, harsher, more and more incomprehensible, and the fog grows ever thicker and darker until it’s a living thing - the only living thing - settling into the chasm between them until she can barely see his hand in front of her face.

And she may not be dead, but this may be worse.

_That’s not enough for me!_

Darkness settles in his hair, on his lashes. Drips and oozes down his cheeks, over lips so full she wants - even now she _wants_ -

(And what threat is damnation to the already damned?)

She tastes ink.


End file.
